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Educated people are often seduced by their own intelligence into believing things that aren’t necessarily true; simply because they can’t imagine being wrong. If you’ve ever met someone like this you know what I mean, and you might even call that an entirely different kind of madness. Any way you want to look at it, the two spend about half the movie together and the question of who is nuts and who’s being led around by assumption gets murkier by the second. Eventually they set out to find Goines when they discover that not only was he hiding a dirty little secret, but also might be smarter than the average bear after all.

For a Terry Gilliam film, Twelve Monkeys is relatively grounded and sedate. Exploring perception, madness and dual mental states is nothing new for the former Python, but directing someone else’s script keeps him more focused than usual. This works in the film’s favor because given the story’s already ambitious subject matter, Gilliam’s tendency toward visual and intellectual overkill was not required. What the story needed was sympathy, and it is in part Gilliam’s affinity for this kind of material that makes it work.

The entire question of who’s crazy and who’s not ends up being beside the point because the weird convict and his eminent shrink both eventually come to believe in the same thing, just for different reasons. Some people let reality shape their opinions, while others let their opinions shape reality. Some people assign significance to events based on a pre-existing ideology or methodology, applying the same solutions to every problem. Others simply allow the context of an event to guide their reaction to it. At different times in the story Cole struggles with one while Railly struggles with the other, and the suggestion seems obvious, at least to me: Neither way of thinking is universally flawless. They’re both necessary and the trick is to know when one is needed over the other.

I have a friend whose favorite tension breaking catch phrase is “Where’s Bruce Willis when you need him?” I always assumed he was referring to John McClane, but maybe he’s talking about James Cole. In this increasingly Red State, Blue State society of ours, a message of intellectual flexibility delivered by a hard luck regular Joe might be just what the doctor ordered. Maybe that really is the best kind of time travel story there is.

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